Lord, please bless these words. If there is anything worthwhile, all praise goes to you. If not, then the fault is mine.

There is not a much more appropriate Gospel to precede a sermon on Martin Luther King since King preached the good news to the poor to proclaim freedom from oppression and force the powerful to take sight of people they hid from view for over three centuries of slavery and segregation.

It is stunning to discover, even more than before, at what a young age King understood his mission.
The King Papers Project of Stanford University has just released the sixth volume of King’s writings, sermons, letters and drafts for essays. The sixth volume is most noteworthy for writings of King when he was still a teenager. These writings were rotting in the basement of the King home until the family gave the project permission to go through them in 1997.

Clayborne Carson, the founding editor of this now 22-year-old project said to me, "Most people think King grew into his opposition to the Vietnam War, grew into global issues, grew, so to speak, beyond race into speaking about other things. He was a person struggling to be understood, yet was so boxed in by his public image and public expectations . . . What the writings make abundantly clear was that now we can see that the King of 1968 was finally saying what he believed in 1948."

So what was King saying in 1948, seven years before his name would become associated with that of Rosa Parks?

King said, “Sincerity is not enough for the preaching ministry. The minister must be both sincere and intelligent. To often do our ministers possess the former but not the latter. . .preaching should grow out of the experiences of the people. Too often do educated ministers leave the people lost in the fog of theological abstractions.”

“On the one hand, I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other, I must attempt to change to societies so that the individual soul will have a change. Therefore, I must be concerned about unemployment, slums and economic insecurity. I am a profound advocator of the social gospel.”

Nineteen years old! I don’t know what you were writing at 19, but if you’re like me, you read these latest King Papers with a profound dread and embarrassment over your personal underachievement.

I was writing high school sports in Milwaukee. It was fun to write about a high school football championship. But to think of one’s self as a champion against unemployment, slums and economic insecurity? Talk about a man who knew where he was going. Oh, by the way, he was ordained and appointed associate pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church that year.

You think that’s amazing? Try the next year when he was still 20. Eighteen years before he would give his famous anti-Vietnam speech, the speech where he would call America the strange liberators who destroyed Vietnamese villages to save them, 54 years before the strange liberators would destroy Iraqi villages to save them, King wrote this:

“The greatest need of civilization today is not of political security. The greatest need of civilization today is not a well-rounded United Nations. The greatest need of civilization today is not a multiplicity of material goods. The greatest need of civilization today is not the superb genius of science as important as it is.

The greatest need of civilization today is moral progress.

With the most amazing means of production in history we have unemployment. With the world’s most amazing world contacts on record, we make world wars. With all our knowledge and training, we hardly know enough to avoid sowing the seeds of another war. I tell you, it is not enough to have the power fo concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. It is not enough to know truth. We need not only knowledge which is power but wisdom, which is control.

Four years later and still two years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, King wrote about the False God of Nationalism. "The watchword of this new religion is 'My country, right or wrong.'. . . In Germany, it was preached by Hitler. In Italy, it was preached by Mussolini.
And in America it is being preached by the McCarthy’s and the Jenners, the advocators of white supremacy, and the America first movements."


King once wrote, “We of 1949 AD will not escape the question of our Lord. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world of means, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers and subways and lose the end of the soul?”

We of 2007 AD have not have escaped those questions. We are still asking them. Clayborne Carson told me that the global vision of the early King make ironic the criticism he took for his anti-Vietnam speeches from civil rights leaders who feared losing domestic support from the Johnson administration.

"When you add it up," Carson said of the early writings, "it's as if King is saying, 'You guys haven't been listening to me.' "

Carson told me that what makes King more fascinating than ever is that the early writings show a man who “did not come easily to his faith. There were lots of doubts, questions along the way. You see him struggle all the way through. He's still a teenager, struggling . . .He had the humility to accept the notion that a billion believers can't be all wrong or all right."

King had the courage, at the height of the McCarthy Era, to write that while communism and Christianity were incompatible, communism contains many essential truths that should challenge Christians since it arose “as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged,” “emphasizes a classless society, and came with a strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice."

Carson told me, "Even today you can see how dangerous King still is. In the schools, are they going to talk about the Martin Luther King who was profoundly disturbed by economic injustice? That's perhaps too controversial. They'd rather talk about: 'We once had these problems. The problem was called race, and he solved the problem.' That's the simplistic lesson. The moment you have a real King to teach, it'll become very controversial.”

To wit, every year, the president of the United States makes a proclamation on Martin Luther King’s birthday.

But is the president willing to read the King who went on to write in a previously forgotten Detroit sermon in 1961, “I am convinced that maybe in America we’ve used too much of our wealth to establish military bases around the world than establishing bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Are those who deny or delay the reality of global warming willing to read the King who talked about powerful fools who “talked as if he regulated the seasons?”

Just this past week, scientists moved the nuclear doomsday clock from seven minutes before midnight to five before midnight. Who among us is willing to read the King who wrote, “The alternative to understanding goodwill, to a world of brotherhood, to world government, to disarmament, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools?”

From rotting boxes of books in the King basement, we now have new insights into the man who came to preach good news to the poor. The question remains, nearly 60 years after he declared his mission for himself:

Who among us will attempt to change the soul of individuals so that societies may be changed? Who will attempt to change the societies so the individual soul will have a change?

Thank you and In the Lord’s name, Amen